Indium Abundance

Phil Zarrow: This video is for anyone concerned with the availability of indium. I will include an assessment of the status of indium, as well as address wide-spread misconceptions.

 

Bill, let's talk about the availability of indium. Is there enough indium?

 

Bill Jackson: The simple answer to that is, yes. There is enough indium to make the products that the world needs today and in the future.

 

Phil Zarrow: That sounded like a loaded answer. Why do we hear so many sources reporting that the world is running out of indium?

 

Bill Jackson: What we see happening is that we have a very mature system in place today, where materials are used for flat panel display. Sixty to 70% of the usage of indium in the world today is used to take and make from indium into an indium tin oxide, which ultimately ends up on flat panel displays. It's a very large and mature market.

 

For anyone to come up with another material to break into that market, one of the things that we see is they will come out and say, “The world's going run out of indium in 2, 3, 4, 5, years. You need to be looking at other materials because, obviously, if it runs out, you have nothing to work with.” We see different kinds of materials that are being worked on, and pushed out into the world, out into the market.

 

Something key that we've looked at, and we understand, is 50 to 75 years’ worth of proven reserves of indium are available based on what we know today. These materials are also supplemented by a very mature recycle and reclaim stream. We take this very, very serious. We take a high amount of responsibility to make sure that we are moving these recycle, and reclaim streams actively in our facilities. We've been doing this for a number of years. We move a lot of material through.

 

A basic rule of thumb is one-third of the annual indium usage is new indium, and two-thirds is recycled. We continually work on that, and work with different mines, and users, and smelters, and just people that have activity going on with the indium, and using the indium products to make sure that they're very aware and are working with the recycle stream, the reclaim stream.

 

Phil Zarrow: To cut through the propaganda, where can we go to find more factual information about indium availability.

 

Bill Jackson: You can go right to the US Geological Survey. Look and do a search for their type of information. They're very independent. They're going to take a very close look at it, and they have, and they publish reports. For instance, they have published reports to say there is more indium in the earth's crust than silver. Today, we don't hear about silver running out. Silver is a very important material in many, many different types of industries, including health care.

 

I think if there was going to be a problem with that, it would be very public at this point in time. Also, we prepare white papers, and put periodic information on our website at www.indium.com, that we refresh periodically based on new information that we have.

 

Phil Zarrow: Bill, thank you very, very, much.

 

Bill Jackson: You're very welcome.